Change Management And Leadership Styles

During significant change the role of the CEO and Senior Executive team is critical in engaging employees in the new organizational vision. However many fail to do this because they think that simply telling employees what is going to happen and why is enough for them to understand how they fit into the new big picture.

The key to employee engagement and change management is to have a leadership style that clearly demonstrates the contribution employees will make to the new organizational vision. Both aspects of communication are important in any change program. This includes providing regular information vehicles such as intranets, CEO emails, newsletter updates and face to face presentations. However these information tools on their own will not change behaviour. All transformational leaders know that you need to create a situation where the employee is actively involved in understanding what the change is and most importantly how it will effect them.

It is only then that you will achieve the Aha! factor when they say, “Now I get it”. So how do we demonstrate the impact of organizational change on employees? Let's look at this example. An organization wants to communicate the financial results to employees and the usual approach is to post the employee annual report on the intranet. But this time they need to do something different, they want employees to understand why the company needs to improve and what shareholders base their decisions on. So they decided to run free lunchtime information sessions for their employees on how to invest in the share market and held them for one hour each week for four weeks.

The topics progressed from understanding the share market, categories of companies listed etc till the final week they examined annual reports. So in this final session they were reviewing annual reports and came to the last one for the session and after reading through the data the question was asked of employees, so who would invest in this company, few put their hands up. And you guessed it, the company was their company and with a collective Aha! the employees finally got the message. As in this instance, a large transformation program including HR, training and operational initiatives was developed to build on this. Transformational leadership is all about taking employees with you on the journey of change.

Involving people in the changes and linking those changes to how they do their work will make change management a much easier strategy to implement.
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